Constable

At the Paris Salon of 1824, one visitor pulled a companion toward an English landscape: “The ground appears to be covered with dew.” What had John Constable put into an ordinary rural scene to make it feel so startlingly alive?

C. Lewis Hind returns to the moment when Constable’s The Hay Wain and two smaller landscapes unsettled the conventions of the French art world. In an age when painters were said to study pictures more than nature, Constable trusted his own eyes—and made freshness, light and the look of the countryside his cause. Hind follows the painter’s path from his resolve to seek truth in nature to the Paris exhibition that set landscape artists talking, while asking what the finished picture can still reveal to a viewer today. What did Constable see that other painters had learned to overlook?

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